China_Report_Issue_49_June_2017

E nvIROnMEnT

I

n the spring
of 2016, when
Wei Shuan-
bing, a villager in
northern China,
was working on his
family cornfield,
an adult leopard
jumped down from
the slope of a nearby mountain, padded across the road, and ambled
up the slope of the base of the next mountain. “A couple of other
villagers were around, and we all saw the leopard at that exact mo-
ment,” recalled Wei to ChinaReport in mid-May. Heshun county is
near Jinzhong City in China’s northern Shanxi Province, some 400
kilometres southwest of Beijing.
Wei and fellow villager Er Bao met another leopard a few days be-
fore, in the mountain forest. There had been no sightings of leopards
by locals for the past two decades. The personal encounter of the big
cat reminds Wei of his almost forgotten teenage memories, before
the mid-1980s, when it was common for him to spot leopards in the
surrounding mountains. “The leopards were not afraid of humans
and they never ever attacked humans as far as I know,” Wei told our
reporter during a recent telephone interview, “In most cases, they

would walk away in-

differently when I met

them.”

Since the late 1980s,

due to various reasons

including deforesta-

tion, road construction,

coal mining activities

in the Taihang Moun-

tain range in Shanxi, as well as poaching, the number of leopards fell

sharply. Wei said that since 2000 he hadn’t seen any leopards until

this year. Thanks to the country’s national Natural Forest Conserva-

tion Programme launched in 2000 and the confiscation of privately-

owned rifles from the late 1990s, the North China Leopard, a sub-

species of the leopard family, very slowly clawed its way back. “There

are no reliable statistics yet indicating how many leopards there are

in Shanxi,” Song Dazhao of the Chinese Felid Conservation Alliance

(CFCA), a domestic big cat conservation NGO, told ChinaReport

in May.

“Locals in Heshun can generally live quite peacefully with wildlife,

and they do not feel frightened if they see a leopard nearby,” Song

said to the reporter, explaining that the area’s comparatively hospi-

table natural environment and sufficient prey also contributed to the

The North China Leopard

reviving a Species

The north China Leopard was once heading for extinction, until

conservation efforts brought its numbers up. But for how long?

By Wang Yan

A leopard takes a drink

in Shanxi Province,

2016

Photo by cfp